Many Health Care Organizations (HCOs) have large investments (millions of dollars) in surgical instruments, but lack the ability to effectively manage their surgical instrument inventory. In most HCOs, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of unique instrument types, and tens of thousands (in some cases hundreds of thousands) of individual instruments.
The ability to accurately identify unique surgical instruments from a large quantity of instruments is essential to many of the basic processes in the perioperative environment. The need to identify surgical instruments is shared by many individuals serving in many different roles within the HCO. There is a steep learning curve to obtain familiarity with even the most common instruments types, which leads to frequent misidentification of instruments. The sheer number of instruments makes manual instrument identification impractical.
A significant number of surgical instruments are lost, stolen, or broken in HCOs on an annual basis and most HCOs do not even attempt to maintain an accurate inventory of surgical instruments because of the challenges and labor costs associated in instrument identification. When HCO's inventory their surgical instruments, the inventory process is typically performed manually, leading to many of the problems discussed above.